A picture of the cover of a book called the Speed of Trust came up in my IG feed recently called the Speed of Trust. After reading a synopsis of the book , I was reminded that all affairs of the soul eventually find their way into “better ways to do business” books. And while trust is indeed an essential element in every relationship, personal or professional, the development of a trust fund within us for ourselves is often forgotten.

I spoke of the importance of making trust deposits here and building up trust funds with your family, especially your children. You better have extra trust in there for when things go a little rough and misunderstandings happen. If both parties were aware of the value of this surplus you’re building, it would be even better. We could appreciate the better times and work hard to mend ourselves in the worse ones.

I am struck by all this gracious goodwill for everyone’s benefit except ourselves. Everything about and for ourselves we take for granted. We can’t hear our self-bullying words. We ignore ourselves and follow paths that aren’t ours, as well as feed, neglect, and dress our bodies according to others’ standards. We then quell our discontent and distrust of ourselves with Tv, booze, and sugar. Our own trust funds with ourselves are non-existent.

I am slowly coming to understand that my inner child has every reason to never trust me again. But that this trust is essential to my happiness and to find more purpose and create more meaningful work. She has to believe that I will keep her safe and not ignore her needs. That is how the trust fund begins to form with anyone as well as yourself. That showing self-compassion instead of employing judgement is the next step to this growing up process.

And lastly, if I am a person who trusts myself and my own choices, then I’m someone who others will trust. Because “do as I say not as I do” never works for kids and it could be a deal breaker when I work with anyone else. Self-confidence and self-trust need a track record and I’m slowly starting to make one.

Anyone find this familiar? Do you trust you? I urge all thoughts here or anywhere I’m online. Links below.

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As parents, we have a lot of damage control to manage. We expect that our children will be teased so we try to give them un-teasable names. We imagine they’ll be injured by the coffee table so we choose to have a round coffee table. We see the food struggle coming and so we make their meal choices simple so they’ll eat. But for all our parental controlling, do we consider the benefits of seeing the disasters and circumstances through to their not so perfect endings? Because there’s a lot to be learned by this practice occasionally.

I remember reading in one of my parenting help books that if you have a problem with a kid who whines for the candy at the check out line in the grocery store, you need to set up a sting operation. Knowing they’ll behave this way, you say to them ahead of time as your headed to the store in need of pretend items, “we will leave if you pull this behavior stunt”. Then you go into the store grabbing this pretended needed item and when they act like they were told not to, you ask the cashier to please put the item back and you leave immediately and calmly. You are hedging bets for your future reliability. You are letting that child know he/she is not in charge. This is a very good example of how to reestablish your authority but sometimes you need to go all out the other way and let it go.

I spoke with a woman who was fretting about her son’s dental hygiene. She said he refused to take care of his teeth. And someone said, just wait until he wants to have a girlfriend. He’ll change that tune really quickly because no one wants to kiss someone with a skanky funk mouth. He was probably suffering a little from “if you tell me to do it then I don’t wanna”but there’s a point when, as a mother, you have to let lessons be learned. There’s always the free dental services at the Dental School when he has future dental health problems. Sadly, the only person he’s punking out against is himself.

l took my daughter into the bathroom last night and she refused to go to the potty when I asked her. The old “I don’t have to” but “I really don’t want to be told what to do” trick. And sure enough, there was a wet bed four hours later. I knew what the circumstances were going to be but we have been pull-up free for a week and I know she has to go all the way out and feel the discomfort to learn. Sometimes we have to see our way through to the real worse case scenario, the “what if” so that the lesson can be learned the “hard way”. Because life is a better teacher than we can ever be.

And If you enjoyed what you read, subscribe, via the subscription box in the sidebar, to my thrice weekly posts via your email box. And visit me on Instagramto see my daily pictures, friend meor like my pageon Facebook. Or come find me on Twitteror Pinteresttoo. I am always practicing Intentional In-touchness so chat at me please. I live for conversations.

You may not choose to run a marathon for yourself but you would for a cause you felt truly moved by. It feels the same way with self-recovery, the process of rediscovery of our truest strongest selves. It is such a struggle through forests of fear and sorting of fact from fiction that a person would really truly rather not. Unless you have kids. Then your whole perspective on who you need to be changes.

Much of what I have done never would have happened unless I had kids who I knew would be getting a better me for my process. It started with the conscious clearing of anxiety, finding a spiritual community, and quitting smoking. It continued with beginning this blog as a way to write and better my writing with regularity. And it became a self-bettering process of even larger proportions when I was asked to teach a seminar, admitted that I would write a book, and started my own community online and in real life.

Passive to active living and reactive versus proactive choices were shifts in my lifestyle that I can see evidence of change. And if I can see them, so can my children. If I want them to live a life of empowerment and opportunity, I need to model what that looks like. Because they will always learn by what you are doing more than what you are saying. Immediately I remember the anti-drug PSA from the 80’s where the parent asks the kid where they learned to smoke / do drugs and the kids says, “I learned it by watching you!”(see the link to the very bad quality You Tube snippet below.)

If there isn’t one good reason to have kids, it’s that accountability to the world to be the best role model you can be. Of course there’s also that immense pride of creating beings that you know will positively add to the world. And the huge quantities of love hormones you get throughout their lives when you hug them. But I truly feel an immense pride and compassion for my humanity when I’m sloppily slam in the middle of working this stuff out. Because I want the next generation to be able to choose process over perfection. To have witnessed what it means to struggle and win. Because that’s what I’m doing all the time here.

Anyone got an amen for me? Shout it out.

And If you enjoyed what you read, subscribe, via the subscription box in the sidebar, to my thrice weekly posts via your email box. And visit me on Instagramto see my daily pictures, friend meor like my pageon Facebook. Or come find me on Twitteror Pinteresttoo. I am always practicing Intentional In-touchness so chat at me please. I live for conversations.

Got together with my friend Karen and as we’re talking about our recent endeavors and priorities, she mentions prioritizing her family “being together”. She felt her family needed some sort of activity that all family members could participate together in. And I thought, Wow, both of us are fighting for family time.

On the way home from Baltimore on Easter, I told my mother-in-law that there just isn’t a single picture of my nuclear family together. We really didn’t ever exist. We children were conceived and born in California but by the time I was 6 months and we moved to Maryland, there was a new career for my Dad and we we’re no longer a family. Not the kind that is important enough to fight for and hold on to above and beyond all other things. Our family life dissolved slowly and painfully. Like many children, I was a scrap of their misbegotten marriage.

Because of my experience, I am actively and consciously making sure that my children know they belong to something stronger and more stable than they are. I am intentionally making moments and legacy for them that they will weave into their life stories. And I guarantee those won’t suck half as much as mine did.

We went to the Salisbury, Maryland Zoological Park on the Tuesday after Easter. We stopped at our favorite diner on the way down where my children were marvelously behaved. We rolled through the Toys R Us to exchange a doubled birthday present and both got a new toy. And we rolled back into town with a big old family memory win. My husband and I even thanked our children for their wonderful behavior.

I am making it up as I go along. But I also believe that if you lead with intention and intuition, you can do a good job of weaving a life that you like and maybe love. And those little beings I birthed from my very own body are so worth the effort.

And If you enjoyed what you read, subscribe, via the subscription box in the sidebar, to my thrice weekly posts via your email box. And visit me on Instagramto see my daily pictures, friend meor like my pageon Facebook. Or come find me on Twitteror Pinteresttoo. I am always practicing Intentional In-touchness so chat at me please. I live for conversations.

It’s conflicting to be a parent. They are of me but not mine. I need to be open and honest for them to trust me. But I need to keep a safe distance when they have to work out who they are because sometimes, that work is at my expense. Frankly, my children will bully me to get their needs met. They’ll be disrespectful but only to me. It’s business, not personal. They’re working themselves out and I’ve got the bruises to prove it.

My son’s a bully when he wants more screen time or when he needs food because he’s suddenly starving. And my daughter is a terrorist. It may be emotional terrorism but its exhausting just the same. I wrote about suffering from post traumatic toddler disorder here.She actually cries at me when she has a need. It can be manipulative and it’s part of her survival arsenal.

For me, there’s such a fine balance between being available for them constantly and being vulnerable to burn out. Unless my children are physically not in the house with me, I am never off duty. And they are very entitled to have their needs met. I do draw a line when their needs are encroaching on my needs. But even Miss Sassafras still busts in the bathroom while I’m on the potty despite my protests.

Last week I made a new “chores, expectations, and rewards” chart for my son. The holidays had him spoiled with the amount of screen time he was getting. And without boundaries, he had begun to come at me, pestering me and continually asking me for more time like a true junkie until he hoped I relented.

These new boundaries are now on paper and not up to me. He has an allotted amount of time and if he runs over, it eats into the next play time. He can earn more time by additional chores. But currently the only option for more screen time is raking and he hates that.

Dinner prep in the kitchen is often the worst time for me to be bullied and terrorized. My son, after unplugging, suddenly found himself excruciatingly hungry and badgered me so badly that he was banned from the kitchen. And the rest of the night, my husband had to do negotiations to get my son to apologize to me. Fiona has been known to come at me while my hands are covered with dinner prep badgering me for fruit roll-ups and then crying at me when I deny her. Hunger can make people do crazy mean things.

I understand our collective humanity and how our inner toddlers have needs that they need fulfilled right freaking now. It is survival in process. But I also know that I am the last boundary standing between them and those needs sometimes. I try very hard to not take their disrespect personally but I would do myself and them an injustice if I didn’t stand my ground on what methods are acceptable to get your needs met. The battle will continue I fear but hopefully, in the end, I’ll win the war of raising nice children.

And If you enjoyed what you read, subscribe, via the subscription box in the sidebar, to my thrice weekly posts via your emailbox. And visit me on Instagram to see my daily pictures, friend me or like my page on Facebook. Or come find me on Twitter orPinterest too. I am always practicing Intentional Intouchness so chat at me please. I live for conversations.

My name is Shalagh Hogan, pronounced Shay-La. I'm the mother of a toddler, a tween, and my five year-old blog and I turned 50 this year. My hope and joy as a writer, an artist, and an uber-creative, is that by sharing my journey of self-discovery, others will gain inspiration and permission for their own journeys.

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